Confessions of an e-book bum

Finding what you’re looking for

While I found an enjoyable read (albeit not quite what I was looking for) for my Saturday shorts, I also finished another e-book Saturday which was exactly what I was looking for.

“A Winter Dandelion” by Amy Steiner was a delightful journey of recovery and learning to “let go and let God.” I’d highly recommend this book to anyone dealing with the struggles of being a caretaker to an older parent or loved-one. Full of poignant humor, this book is a journey that leads the reader through dementia and past abuse, past raising your own children, and ends in letting go and realizing that you have to let everyone make their own decisions and mistakes.

I found this book during a search, sorted by price, for “recovery fiction.” I had been looking over a couple of free books given to me by an author on the subject of stroke and missionary discipleship, and they just didn’t pique my interest the way I had hoped they might (I will return to finish these books at some point). What those two books did do for me was cause me to realize the hang-ups on my current writing project — the fear that a memoir dealing with stroke recovery may be too private and the fear that no one will find the work interesting.

And then I began to wonder, what about a work of fiction (perhaps even a series focusing on different scenarios, if successful), loosely based on my experience? Could it work? Would it be interesting?

I’ve read medical thrillers and medical romance, but I couldn’t recall any simple “medical fiction,” something that specifically dealt with the day-to-day details of dealing with a medical situation. I suppose there’s probably a lot of generic fiction that does deal with these issues, but I didn’t know how to find it specifically.

However, my search worked. “A Winter Dandelion” was exactly the sort of book I was looking for to tell me that a simple fiction dealing lightly with medical issues and recovery in the context of literature can, and does, work.

Published in 2011, “A Winter Dandelion” is Steiner’s only work available for the Kindle. I hope to see more from her in the future. Regularly priced at $2.99, I feel like this is a nice read for the price, and Steiner does periodically offer a free promotional period for the book.